Dante Di Stefano

January 18, 2024

“Curriculum Vitae” by Dante Di StefanoPosted by

Cold Sun by Jeanne Wilkinson, sepia photograph of an abandoned shopping cart in a snowy landscape

Image: “Cold Sun” by Jeanne Wilkinson. “Curriculum Vitae” was written by Dante Di Stefano for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2023, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

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Dante Di Stefano

CURRICULUM VITAE

When I was young, I wrote a long poem
about a shopping cart overturned in
the Susquehanna River and I called it
a psalm and I can still recall the sun-
light in that poem and how the muddy
green water eddied through it and how time
slowed down as I waded through its shallows.
 
I think there was an angel in it, one
of Blake’s, dancing on the rusty right front
wheel, pointing to the invisible moon
orbiting the distant planet of all
the poetry I would one day commit
to paper and windpipe and atmosphere
and intestine and aching knuckle bone.
 
And now, in middle age, I don’t know if
the sun rises or sets in my poems,
but I know it is there, way out beyond
the overpass, and I’m here at the edge
of the desolate parking lot, where stray
cart and mud and snow commingle and God
is in the chain link and the streetlight wires
 
that hopscotch my view of the horizon,
and I believe that one day, when I’m gone,
sparrowing deep underground, I’ll still be
spiraling in the center of my lines,
voyaging along the turnpikes of verbs
enjambed in black and white, constellated
in ink on a page, syllabled to life.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
December 2023, Artist’s Choice

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Comment from the artist, Jeanne Wilkinson: “I have many favorites in this group of poems. Some of my friends read also, all coming up with different choices, making me go back and read again, again, again; this was a very pleasurable problem. Several of the poems gave me goosebumps, but I kept coming back to one that made me shiver every time I read it, and still does. It’s ‘Curriculum Vitae’ and I love the mood, which seems to me infused with luminous sepia tones, matching the atmosphere of my photograph: bleak, lonely, but not without hope. Bottom line, this poet had me at Blake’s angel.”

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December 3, 2023

“After Reading that Merriam-Webster’s 2023 Word of the Year Is ‘Authenticity’” by Dante Di StefanoPosted by

Dante Di Stefano

AFTER READING THAT MERRIAM-WEBSTER’S 2023 WORD OF THE YEAR IS AUTHENTICITY

I wonder about the future poems
I will read, generated by AI,
the imperceptibly pixelated
tulips pushing through the rich soil in them,
 
the deepfake MFA bios attached
to them like deflated orange balloons,
the shining metaphors crowing from them
as I open the App of my eyelids
 
and scroll lithely from stanza to stanza.
I wonder if I’ll be able to notice
in their red wheelbarrows full of roses,
how a chatbot has damasked every stem.
 
I found the poem I’m writing now, tucked
in the galley of a tiny schooner
circumnavigating the four chambers
of my heart. It was wedged under a cask
 
of lime juice. It was written in the scrawl
of a mad captain hellbent on shipwreck
or treasure or unspecified glory.
It was found, it was wedged, it was written
 
to explain a flower growing in me,
a blue bonnet sprouting from my boot print,
gently stretching skyward to touch the stars,
but like all poems we humans fashion
 
from want and need and yes and must and what,
it ended up saying something else beyond
the arc of unsaying, something fevered
and cut, rizzed up against the scurvy dark.
 

—from Poets Respond
December 3, 2023

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Dante Di Stefano: “Often lately, I have been teaching and reading and thinking about generative AI. Despite all I’ve read about Sam Altman, ChatGPT, etc., it’s hard for me to imagine how this technology will transform our world. Reading the article about Meriam-Webster’s word of the year further confirmed how enmeshed we are in this transformation already. Authenticity is a fraught term in poetry anyway, so I think this poem wandered into some of the fraughtness and complexity that comes with the terrain of lyric saying. For me this is less a poem about AI than it is a poem about the ancient technology of poetic utterance in all its mystery. The word rizz that I use at the end of the poem is an internet neologism added to Meriam-Webster this year, meaning ‘romantic charm or appeal.’” (web)

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June 18, 2023

“After the Death of Cormac McCarthy …” by Dante Di StefanoPosted by

Dante Di Stefano

AFTER THE DEATH OF CORMAC MCCARTHY, I LOOK AT THE LOCUST TREE OUT MY CLASSROOM WINDOW AND TRY TO EXPLAIN THE VIOLENCE AT THE HEART OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE TO MY CHILDREN IN THE MANNER OF AN ERIC CARLE BOOK

Over there, there is a green thing in the way,
under the silver of the moon that isn’t shining
 
because it is the daytime, and on its many arms,
there are so many thorns you could call it a coat,
 
a thorn coat, and there is always someone climbing
its trunk and hurting their hands so much so.
 
A little boy is climbing and a little girl is climbing
and with them the ghosts of their dead grandparents
 
and their unborn children’s children and a caterpillar
who only knows how to eat and eat, thorn and leaf,
 
on the way to becoming a butterfly and a brown bear
and a goldfish out of water flopping upward
 
and a wolf pup and a lion cub and an eagle without
a nest and you and me and every mother and father
 
and son and daughter who ever was—we are all
climbing and climbing and climbing until our hands
 
ache and ache and ache and make a cradle of that ache
and hang a lullaby in the air above that cradle
 
and we are all going up and up and up and it is
painful and strange because we are all also falling
 
down and down and down, deeper than the deepest
part of the ocean, which is singing to us in the way
 
a humpback whale does or in the way the waves
sing to the shore and if you listen very closely,
 
you can hear a great great writer whispering
to the waves in us and the trees in us and the thorns
 
and all that climbing and all those cut palms
and bleeding fingers. Listen. He is ending his book.
 
He is ending the great book of his life. He has no
say in this, but he is saying on the last page: fly them.
 

—from Poets Respond
June 18, 2023

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Dante Di Stefano: “Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorite novelists. I wrote this thinking about his death this week and the ways in which McCarthy’s books have helped me understand our nation’s romance with brutality. I was also thinking about how I might explain some of this to my small children. I’ve read The Hungry Caterpillar and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? a thousand times in the past five years. In Carle’s books the world in all its wonder unfolds. I thought it would be interesting to look at McCarthy’s grim fatalistic view of human nature through the lens of Carle’s imagination. The last two words of the poem are the last two words of my favorite McCarthy novel, Suttree.”

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April 30, 2023

“Elegy for a Ringmaster at Civilization’s End” by Dante Di StefanoPosted by

Dante Di Stefano

ELEGY FOR A RINGMASTER AT CIVILIZATION’S END

After all, we are living,
now, in your America,
the air thick with arias
of insults, our neighbors mic’d,
their grievances caroling
 
out into the howling crowd.
Here, everyone arms themselves
with slurs & secrets & shock-
ing revelations about
lineage & history.
 
We used to watch your show in
dorm rooms & in living rooms,
waiting for the fuse you lit
to explode. Now, all we do
is follow fuse after fuse;
 
our mother tongue has become
the language of bombshell &
shrapnel, but this is how it
always was. You showed us how
America always breathed,
 
skittering on the lip of
apocalypse, this knowledge
a legacy of your grand-
mothers who died in the camps,
genocide encoded in
 
your DNA, urging you
to pull spectacle’s golden
filament time & again,
& weave it into sound bite
& fist fight & all that’s wild
 
& primal & screaming up
against what’s wretched within.
We watched because you showed us
the beasts & ghosts & monsters
clambering in our own chests.
 
Today, no final thought will
wing itself into the night,
but we will end on one last:
“take care of yourself, & each
other.” Take care of the dark.
 
Let the inside of your eye-
lids bead the braille of a prayer,
mumbling us into the tough
work of doing enough to
run another episode.
 

—from Poets Respond
April 30, 2023

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Dante Di Stefano: “This is an elegy for Jerry Springer who died this week. Like many people my age (44), I disliked his show, but sometimes watched it, despite, or maybe because of, my dislike. For better or worse, Springer was an archetypal American figure, part carnival barker, part confidence man. He harkened back to snake oil mountebanks of the nineteenth century and presaged the age we live in now, where the double helix of reality television and social media compose and decompose and writhe through our national DNA.”

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November 20, 2022

“As the World Population Surpasses 8 Billion, I Purposely Misremember a Line from Anne Carson’s Sappho and Hear in Its Utterance the Song of the Humpback Whale” by Dante Di StefanoPosted by

Dante Di Stefano

AS THE WORLD POPULATION SURPASSES 8 BILLION, I PURPOSELY MISREMEMBER A LINE FROM ANNE CARSON’S SAPPHO AND HEAR IN ITS UTTERANCE THE SONG OF THE HUMPBACK WHALE

More of us than ever before walk
the Earth at once. All over the globe more
men and women fall in and out of love,
 
and open windows frame more rain-facing
faces than ever before in the history of
storms. There are more children learning the sad
 
math of growing up than ever before,
more dead goldfishes flushed down toilets, more
middle schoolers unlearning the bass
 
guitar, string by string. There are more old men
eating canned peaches beneath olive trees,
more family trees scrawled by red crayon
 
in the script and meter of ancient seas.
Strikingly beautiful gray-haired women
bow over raised beds of roses with much
 
more frequency than in any other
era. There are more mothers and more kisses,
more eyelashes fluttering mascara
 
butterflies, more desires, more hands both slapped
and held, more kids praying beneath covers
in the middle of the night. There’s more tears
 
by millions of liters, much more despair,
and surprisingly much more stupid hope
to cling to, to flip-kick off the wall of—
 
more smudged pencil x-es on love letters,
more lipstick traces on coffee cups, more
hips, thighs, breasts, sighs, biceps, collarbones, aches
 
in the groin, in the knuckles, in the beat
of breeze against branch, of throat against verb,
more to fear, to love, to praise, to sing with—
 
to thread into the horizon’s pink hem,
to pull from pine needle and leaf alike
this hymn of the planet spinning into us.
 

—from Poets Respond
November 20, 2022

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Dante Di Stefano: “I wrote this after reading an article about the world population surpassing 8 billion.”

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November 29, 2021

“The Day” by Dante Di StefanoPosted by

Dante Di Stefano

THE DAY

If you could take the day by the hand
even now and say Come Father
—W.S. Merwin

The day rises like a rock
in the hand of my father
coming down hard

on my mother’s windshield
as she puts the car
in reverse and speeds

out the driveway
leaving him to wander
raving down the cul-de-sac

the day I learned the language
of spider web cracks
on glass and how to remain

mute in front of social workers
how not to relate 
the interior fluencies

of rage and other undertows
I prayed myself into
each night under the covers

sleeping on the floor
so I wouldn’t be dragged
out of bed before the day

could come and choke me
into the silence mantling me
in school bus and classroom 

there were so many days 
like that one 
days flowering kicks cut knuckles

and elbows fists and curses
knees and teeth and fuck you
bitch and slut and fat cunt

the day grew spikes on its back
and gilled itself with despair
the fog pawing my light

and still I prayed and wondered
why my mother 
wouldn’t leave him why love

punched holes in drywall 
broke dinner plates 
took a baseball bat to bedposts

and tv screens but it was more
complicated than all that
the day they took my father in

drugged him and put him
in the psychiatric wing
where we saw him for an instant

my brother and I
he was shrunken and so frail
we barely knew him

decades later the days
I spent with him have accrued
a murky sheen of sorrow

and disgust I try not to dwell on
for the sake of my daughter
and my wife I say let’s make

the day a brocade a rocking horse
a bird on the highest power line
the good milk of being born anew

—from Rattle #73, Fall 2021

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Dante Di Stefano: “Rereading this poem is painful for me; the subject matter is hard for me to talk about, but, like all poems, I hope this poem is something more than its subject matter, a necessary, albeit broken, music, a journeywork of enduring and shattering stillness I might dwell in with you.”

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October 11, 2020

“Unacknowledged Laureates” by Dante Di StefanoPosted by

Dante Di Stefano

UNACKNOWLEDGED LAUREATES

Today isn’t the first day I’ve googled Glück
to find out the right pronunciation,
but I admit I haven’t read her much
and might not open the wild irises

I imagine springing from the umlaut
of her last name. I admit I love those
tiny planets orbiting the valley
of that “u” more than I love the promise

of any poem she may have written.
And now I’m wondering, for the first time,
about all the poems I’ll never read,
the ones I’ve missed, the ones that will remain

unwritten until after I die, ones
withheld from me by a whim of tempo.
Oh Louise, as you say in a poem
of yours I looked up online, “Don’t listen

to me; my heart’s been broken.” The world seems
like it’s ending right now, but, then again,
it always does, and, after all, I feel
like I’m carrying all the enjambments

of the poetry I haven’t read—in
the arrhythmias of the everyday—
and this carrying I rarely notice:
an ocean in a single drop, a song.

—from Poets Respond
October 11, 2020

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Dante Di Stefano: “I wrote this poem after reading about Louise Glück’s Nobel Prize win. I was thinking, for the first time, about all of the great poetry that for one reason or another I won’t read in my lifetime. It’s interesting to consider how what you haven’t read might vertebrae your life as much as what you have read.”

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